Mental health,religion & culture

It has been found that the Muslim population in the UK seek spiritual advice from traditional faith healers for psychiatric and related problems. The important role that religious beliefs may have on perceptions of mental illness and substance misuse warrants further investigation. The aims were to examine the views of Muslims faith healers on symptoms and changes in behaviour commonly described as “psychosis” and “substance misuse”. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with Muslim faith healers from various backgrounds. Data were analysed according to the conventions of qualitative research using grounded theory methods. Religious conceptualisations played a key role in the understanding of both the disorders and consequently the guidance given. There were similarities and differences in the narratives given for psychosis and substance misuse. Healers expressed doubt towards other faith healers and the methods utilised by scientific means. The findings suggest a need for close collaboration between faith healers and mental health workers in order to achieve a culturally sensitive health care system.     

Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt. II

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Effects of Parental Soothing Behavior on Stress Levels of 2–8 Year Old Children During Voiding Cystourethrograms by Phase of Procedure

Using the example of a voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG), a painful radiological procedure, this study investigated whether parental soothing behavior (reassuring comments like “it’s almost over” or “You’re O.K.” and soothing by “sh, sh”) in one phase of the procedure influenced the child’s distress in the following phase. The sample was comprised of 68 2–8 year-old children and the accompanying parent(s). Child and parental behavior during the VCUG was coded using a standardized rating scale (CAMPIS-R). Parental reassurance during the anticipatory phase significantly increased the child’s distress of the following phase, while parental “sh, sh” significantly reduced it. Both parental behaviors showed no significant effect on the child’s distress of the following phase when applied during the procedure itself. Results underline the importance of differentiating between anticipatory and procedural phases of the VCUG. Counselling methods for parents on more appropriate strategies to assist their children during procedural phases of the VCUG are necessary.     

Acquiring ownership and the attribution of responsibility

How is ownership established over non-owned things? We suggest that people may view ownership as a kind of credit given to agents responsible for making possession of a non-owned object possible. On this view, judgments about the establishment of ownership depend on attributions of responsibility. We report three experiments showing that people’s judgments about the establishment of ownership are influenced by an agent’s intent and control in bringing about an outcome, factors that also affect attributions of responsibility. These findings demonstrate that people do not just consider who was first to possess an object in judging who owns it, and are broadly consistent with the view that ownership is acquired through labor. The findings also suggest that rather than exclusively being the product of social conventions, judgments about the establishment of ownership over non-owned things also depend on the psychological processes underlying the attribution of responsibility.     

The accumulating effects of shared expectations

This research examined whether self‐fulfilling prophecies and perceptual confirmation effects accumulated across people. Trios of same‐sex participants, each consisting of two interviewers and one target, were randomly assigned to one of three conditions that served to manipulate interviewers' expectations (i.e., non‐hostile vs. hostile) and the similarity of their expectations (i.e., similar vs. dissimilar) for targets. Each trio participated in an interaction in which interviewers asked targets questions. Targets' hostility during the interaction and interviewers' impressions of targets' hostility following the interaction served as the primary dependent variables. Results indicated that perceptual confirmation effects accumulated across interviewers. Even though targets' behavior during the interaction did not differ across conditions, interviewers nonetheless judged targets as more hostile when both interviewers expected targets to be hostile than when only one did. The authors discuss these findings in terms of the potential implications for those who have multiple inaccurate and unfavorable expectations held about them. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The consistency of disjunctive assertions

In two experiments, we established a new phenomenon in reasoning from disjunctions of the grammatical form either A or else B, where A and B are clauses. When individuals have to assess whether pairs of assertions can be true at the same time, they tend to focus on the truth of each clause of an exclusive disjunction (and ignore the concurrent falsity of the other clause). Hence, they succumb to illusions of consistency and of inconsistency with pairs consisting of a disjunction and a conjunction (Experiment 1), and with simpler problems consisting of pairs of disjunctions, such as eIther there is a pie or else there is a cake and Either there isn't a pie or else there is a cake (Experiment 2), that appear to be consistent with one another, but in fact are not. These results corroborate the theory that reasoning depends on envisaging models of possibilities.     

Reading aloud: The cumulative lexical interference effect

Picture naming shows a cumulative semantic interference effect: Latency for naming a target picture increases as a function of the number of pictures semantically similar to the target that have previously been named (Howard, Nickels, Coltheart, & Cole-Virtue, Cognition 100:464-482, 2006). Howard and colleagues, and also Oppenheim, Dell, and Schwartz (Cognition 114:227-252, 2010), argued that this occurs because of the joint presence in the picture-naming system of three critical properties: shared activation, priming, and competition. They also discussed the possibility that whenever any cognitive system possesses these three properties, a cumulative similarity-based interference effect from repeated use of that cognitive system will occur. We investigated this possibility by looking for a cumulative lexical interference effect when the task is reading aloud: Will the latency of reading a target word aloud increase as a function of the number of words orthographically/phonologically similar to the target that have previously been read aloud? We found that this was so. This supports the general idea that cumulative similarity-based interference effects will arise whenever any cognitive system that possesses the three key properties of shared activation, priming, and competition is repeatedly used.